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We’re not in Great Britain anymore, Dorothy. The good lads at Jaguar have planned a formidable entry into the most popular, largest growing automotive segment in United States in a big way: meet the F-Pace, Jaguar’s first medium luxury crossover SUV.
Critics will say the segment is already too crowded. But as I descend Montenegro’s Kotor-Njeguši road, which boasts 25 cliffside hairpin turns in succession — often squeezed into a single lane — I can’t help but think there may just be room for one more.
The F-Pace is, at its core, an SUV with the soul of a sports car, Ian Callum, Jaguar’s Design Director, tells me. We’re sitting on the roof Aman Sveti Stefan resort sipping Montenegrin white wine. As twilight falls into dusk, a greenish-pink splash of color lights up the sky. Callum ponders aloud the impact the F-Pace will have on the American marketplace.
The primary design mandate for the Jaguar team was to make this SUV look like, well, a Jaguar. The front-end bulge calls to mind the 1968 Jaguar XJ; the taillights are softly reinterpreted versions of those on the E-Type and F-Type. The horizontal line around the “S” on the F-Pace S is inspired by a similar graphic from the 1951 E-Type, Callum’s quite proud to note. There is a sense of muscular tension that runs the length of the car, accomplished by keeping the overhangs as short as possible, forcing the wheels to the corners.
As the third vehicle built on Jaguar’s new lightweight aluminum-intensive architecture, instead of steel, the F-Pace features a slimmed-down body structure, weighing in at less than 300 kilograms, roughly the same as a Fiat 500L. Remarkable, no?
This Jag moves with less of a hearty, bellowing laugh and more of a soft, obligatory titter. The 380 horsepower 3.0-liter supercharged V6 is nearly silent at idle, and there’s little body roll. And then I select “sport” mode, whereupon the car drops a touch and increases speed at a rate that makes me believe Callum’s “SUV with a sports-car soul” axiom. Down the yellow brick road we go.
